


shall i compare thee

by aMassiveDisappointment (BadOldWest)



Series: tumblr prompts [3]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Lord Byron - Freeform, Not quite in that order, Rivalry, Smut, academic rivalry, all that good stuff, pretension, used bookstores, wingman jyn, you know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-08
Updated: 2017-09-11
Packaged: 2018-11-11 09:09:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11145342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadOldWest/pseuds/aMassiveDisappointment
Summary: tumblr prompt: Academic Rivals“If you hand over the Byronic Poetry, I won’t have to hurt you.”Cassian Andor snapped the book in his hand shut, pushing off the shelf he was leaning on.“That’s a threat if I ever heard one, Jyn Erso.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> "i would love an academic rival fic for rebelcaptain!"- anon
> 
> Sorry you had to wait on this one, it's taking more than I had initially planned. I'm guessing 3 chapters? Guessing here. 
> 
> GUESS WHO'S WRITING ANOTHER MULTI-CHAPTER FIC BECAUSE I HAVE NO SELF CONTROL.

_ “Maybe if we just stay asleep, we won’t have to take this exam.”  _

Even her sleepy whisper was harsh enough to make him shiver, curled around his ear in a dull gray morning. He groaned, at first pulling her closer, instinctively melding his lips to hers at the first realization he could. He traced a lazy circle on the back of her shoulder, savoring her shudder. She was always cold, almost never without her signature bulky jacket, but when he’d talked her into shedding it there was an unspoken agreement to never leave her cold again. Under the sheets she was bare, and his body made for quite a substitute. 

“Easiest way to top your score, I’m only mad that I even studied if you’re just going to sleep this one out.”

Her sleepy hand punched against his chest, not awake enough to cause the damage he knew she was capable of. 

“I’d only sit this one out if you stayed here too, idiot.”

“If .2 points below you is idiotic, you need to do something about the metric you use to determine intelligence.”

“.2 can be the difference between life and death, in some contexts.”

“How many times are you going to wake me up letting me know I’m not smart enough for you?”

Her head shrugged on the pillow, her hair flowing and free from its messy bun. She had to really squint at him without her glasses, which he found heartbreakingly cute when he was this tired. 

“How many more times am I going to be waking you up?” she wondered aloud.

He rolled onto his stomach, pushing himself up on his elbows to look at her. 

“What are you doing?” he touched her face curiously, and she leaned against his hand. 

“Thinking about when I have to put my clothes on and go back to hating you.”

“Well we can’t have that,” Cassian whispered, hand dipping between her thighs. She hummed nervously, a little sore from the night before, but his fingers gently coaxed pleasure out of her, as they always did.

“Cassian-”

_ “We can’t have that,” _ he repeated, lips pressed to hers, body surging forward to touch hers to his, a longing he hated but not enough to fight. 

She looked a little sad when they had to dress and do just that, her scuttling off to catch her train back to her apartment, him eating cereal in his apartment, alone. 

 

_ Two months earlier: _

“If you hand over the Byronic Poetry, I won’t have to hurt you.”

Cassian Andor snapped the book in his hand shut, pushing off the shelf he was leaning on. 

“That’s a threat if I ever heard one, Jyn Erso.”

The messy-haired brunette had been silent in her approach. She was interrupting his happy place. Used bookstore. Concave floorboards. Labyrinthine shelving. Nothing costing more than ten dollars. A lot of dust. 

“What do you need it for?”

“Paper on Brontë’s use of the archetypal Byronic Hero in  _ Wuthering Heights.” _

He rolled his eyes. “I thought you were avoiding true love stories, after spending so much time picking them apart in class.”

“Two souls being opposed, or dovetailed, or dualistic, is not true love,” Jyn said flatly. 

“You’re terribly unromantic. And yet,” he wagged the book in her face, retreating around a corner that would have her lose him in an instant,  _ “Romantic poetry,” _ he called when she turned down the wrong aisle. 

He smiled at her grunt of frustration. 

“What do you even need it for?” she needled, holding up a watermarked copy of  _ Fanny Hill. " _ I promise you there’s more of what you’re looking for in  _ this _ than in  _ there.” _

“My intentions are less honorable, but no less valid.  _ She Walks in Beauty _ will get you laid, every time, like a charm.”

She seemed offended to the core of her entire being at the wasteful use of a good book 

“I’m actually using it for an _academic paper,”_ she straightened her back, fearsome and entitled in a way that made his hand want to dart under her skirt.

“First rule of negotiating, Erso” Cassian smiled to himself, listening to her stumble and try and weave through the bookshelves after him, “never let the other party know how much you need what they’re offering.”

“You seem awfully convinced you should teach me something,” she blew her bangs out of her eyes. He smiled easily down at her. He could name a thing or two. 

“Do you need this book?”

“On principle, I must rescue that book from the likes of you.”

“Then I must be obliged to defend it.”

Jyn sighed, and he felt the full weight of midterms hit both of them at the same second. 

“I already picked out what poems I’m using. I can probably find the poems online, but citations would be a nightmare.”

Cassian broke with a sympathetic smile, leading her back to the aisle they’d started in. “Pick me something better.”

Jyn knelt in front of him, taking her job seriously. He would commend her for it if her face wasn’t  _ entirely level _ with his dick. 

“I want this to work, I have a date tonight.”

“Freshman humanities major?”

“I -what?”

He had been caught up staring at the way the frame of her glasses curled behind her ear. 

She smirked up at him, eyes sparkling. “You have A Type.”

_A Type_ heavily implied _Not Me._  

She held up her find, a gloating smile on her face. He rolled his eyes. 

“Emily Brontë?”

Wordlessly, she thumbed through the book, mouth forming words she already knew she’d find. With a pen withdrawn from behind her ear, she marked a line. Smug, she slapped the open book against his chest. 

“She’ll love it,” Jyn called over her shoulder tartly, sauntering away. 

Cassian rolled his eyes, looking at the underlined passage;

 

_ Thee, ever-present, phantom thing- _

_ My slave, my comrade, and my King _

 

Hell. It would work on some freshman humanities major. It was sure as fuck working on him. He bought the copy of  _ Fanny Hill _ for good measure. It wasn’t what he was looking for, but he found out a great deal he hadn’t known about Jyn Erso: Literary Pervert.

 

_ One week later: _

She asked him, abruptly in a coffee shop, as he was entrenched in his work at one of the tables, if he was working on the paper for Krennic. Again, he hadn't seen her coming, but he looked up and she was already mid-sentence, gripping the back of the empty chair. 

He was working on the paper for Krennic, and she launched into the suggested sources and this really good outside biography she was reluctant to use because Krennic was a famed control freak and tyrant. 

“I’d just keep your head down and write it as the prompt says. You can take this as a draft of your own, probably much better paper,” Cassian informed her honestly.

“I’d like to get those ideas graded, and some constructive feedback, on the paper I  _ want _ to do.”

“Sit down,” he ordered her, feeling uneasy by her fidgeting and looking down at him so intensely, “you can still do things with a paper on your own. Hell, it sounds interesting, I’d read it.”

She stopped adjusting herself in the seat across from him, frozen in place. 

_ “Really?” _

He rolled his eyes. “I can agree with your academic findings, even if you are a pain in the ass. What’s the paper about”

She softened, her guard dropping considerably for the first time since he’d met her. 

“It’s more of a pet project,” she explained, smirking into her mug, “I call it Six Degrees of Byron’s Dick.”

He almost choked on his coffee. “He certainly got around.”

“You’d be amazed. Aaron Burr, for instance.”

“No.”

_ “Yes.” _

“He  _ fucked _ Aaron Burr?”

Jyn rolled her eyes, but he could tell she was excited to tell him; “No. It’s a game. Byron was Bffs with Percy and Mary Shelley, Mary Shelley was the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, founder of modern feminism, and Godwin was good friends with Aaron Burr when Aaron Burr fled to England after shooting Alexander Hamilton. Which also ties Byron indirectly to a bunch of founding fathers.”

Cassian couldn’t help but laugh, for the first time, with her instead of at her expense. 

“That _has_ to be a coincidence.”

“Byron's daughter helped with the mathematical calculations that led to the modern computer, so you can also work forwards from there.”

“Do you just sit around and think this stuff up?”

“Nope. I do thorough research,” her smile turned challenging. “Brontë sisters were obsessed with him too. Based a lot of early writing on him. He never had sex with them. But his dick inspired poems, and they used those poems as inspiration. So we have him to thank for that.”

“Speaking of Brontë sisters…” he hadn’t been able to form words about her suggestion at the bookstore. He tried to. In class, he watched her chew on a pen, glasses smudged with too many fingerprints, pointedly ignoring him. Words failed. 

She raised her eyebrows. “Right. How did that date go.”

“It worked.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Oh. Gross. Why do I ask you these things?”

Cassian laughed, “No idea. Thanks for being my wing-woman.”

Jyn smiled, "I'm good at it."

From then on, Jyn started slipping him lines like that as a joke, in passing. He could only answer as often as she did, which was a breakneck, challenging pace for his wits. They had a dog-eared copy of a collection of love poems they’d procured from the bookstore and passed back and forth, highlighting, annotating, and shoving into each other’s arms in hallways or at the beginnings and ends of classes. 

Jyn almost got kicked out of their shared class with Krennic mid-lecture for making the mistake of looking at his new contribution to the page; Cassian’s notes on Shakespeare's Sonnet 18: _“_ ** _‘Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?’ You make my balls sweat.”_** The sound she made as she read it and the horrified, delighted look on her face was something he already knew he would never forget. 

 


	2. Chapter 2

“You need to stop making me laugh,” she told him once, her breath hissing out of her nose. Cassian’s eyebrows pinched together, and he crouched down to be eye level with her. His face was gravely serious, and entirely too close.

They were leaning on the wall outside Krennic’s office, bickering about who would get to go first. At least she was trying to remind him that she  _ deserved _ to go first. She got there first. She didn’t care if he had a meeting in twenty minutes and her afternoon was free. This was a principled right of hers. 

“Stop it,” she said, her breathing sounding dangerously like a laugh.

His brows further furrowed, biting his lip and nodding intently. 

She swung a limp fist at his shoulder. “Stop.”

She felt anxious, like someone could stumble upon them alone in the hallway. But also...good. 

“Stop what?”

Her smile cracked across her face, and she shook her head at him. 

_ “Stop making me laugh.” _

“I’m not doing anything.”

_ “Knock it off.” _

He grinned at her, staring intently. “Sorry, should I get closer? I just want you to know I’m listening.”

_ Don’t get closer, _ she almost blurted out, but he was dipping his nose near hers, and she lost her words. 

“You’re an asshole,” she said, but she broke, her shoulders shaking with laughter. She half-spun away from him, covering her face. She didn’t even know what she was laughing at, just that it was his fault. He didn’t laugh, but his eyes crinkled at the edges, amusement overtaking his face. 

A door opened behind them, and she suddenly remembered where they were, why they were there. 

“Professor Krennic,” She started to dig her draft out of her bag. 

“Professor Krennic, Jyn was kind enough to allow me to go first.”

Krennic’s lips were in a thin line and he gestured for Cassian to enter, and the door shut just as Jyn realized how pissed she was. 

As she slumped back against the wall, her phone buzzed. Glancing down at it, an unknown number:

**_“Though she be but little, she is fierce.”_ **

Shaking her head furiously, she typed out:

**_“I WILL SMITE THEE.”_ **

 

Jyn was good at lines, good at words, good at making them fit. She might have been the sloppier student, but her gut-punches of thesis and closing statements overwhelmed and usually had her professor excitedly waving a white flag of a perfect score. Her sincerity made her fun for him to fuck with, and that tone had been set for most of their academic career. 

Cassian had always been aware of their differences, but he’d never noticed their similarities. They were wryly smiling over the poetry book, nudging each other to flip pages faster or hands taking over the page-turning when the other couldn’t find the right line quickly enough. Impatience seemed to be the thing that bonded them, and caused 80% of their arguments. 

Cassian was hardworking, clever, and used the tools provided efficiently. His success was more expected, so when he failed to deliver, his grades got docked just enough to know that the fault was his. So his slender margin behind Jyn’s always annoyed him; her arrogance, how easy it was for her, how simple she made it look.

She scared him a little. A lot. He had the feeling she was just toying with him, and when she got bored, catlike as she was, she might eat him. 

“I have another date tonight,” he murmured as she thumbed to  _ La Belle Dame Sans Merci. _

_ “Quelle surprise,” _ she said thickly, glancing up at him over the frames of her glasses. The topic didn’t seem to thrill her as much as it had over the past couple weeks. During his last date he had to call her from the bathroom to tell her to stop texting him every five minutes  _ “ **Have you recited Keats between her thighs yet?”** _

**_“Literary Pervert,”_ ** he finally texted back **_“You use this fine institution for material for your filth.”_**

**_"Does this mean I have to wear a Scarlet 'LP' sewn on all my clothes?"_ **

Jyn shot him an unimpressed look. “Does she like Sylvia Plath?”

“I hope not, as that tends to be a red flag.”

“I like Sylvia Plath.”

“Exactly.”

She punched his arm. 

“I was more asking for her levels of taste.”

“She’s not a big reader,” he began, to which Jyn shot him a  _ so-why-are-you-even-dating-her  _ look _ , _ “What?”

“Come on. Don’t waste her time.”

“Not every girl I date has to be-”

“Be what?”

“Be like you.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Thanks.”

His hand secured around her elbow, apologetic. 

“That’s not what I meant. It’s just a lot of work.”

“I shudder to think,” Jyn swooned against the wall, but her mockery had taken an edge. 

“You know what I mean. The hot, smart girl. Keeping up with that is hard, trying to be the romantic hero who’ll say all the right words and then go down on her against a bookshelf. Girls like you have that  _ fantasy.” _

Jyn’s cheeks flushed. “I think any red-blooded woman wants a man to eat her pussy in a well-stocked library, so I won’t be made to feel ashamed for it,” she said dryly, and he could tell she was letting him off the hook.

Cassian laughed, “As you shouldn’t.”

She chewed her lip, but he felt that pushing the subject would only make things worse. And he’d keep picturing her up against a bookshelf, thighs bared around his ears. 

She saved him, again; “So what are you choosing for your seduction verse?”

“Going to use  _ She Walks in Beauty, _ unless you can pull something better out of your ass.”

She made a face at him. “I still don’t see how that one works like a charm.”

He smirked, placing the book out of her hands. “Hell, it only takes the first line.”

“I sincerely doubt that.”

“it’s not even the words themselves, it’s how you use them.”

“Now you’re just being blasphemous.”

Cassian raised his eyebrows, sliding his fingers under the strap of her bag. He let it drop to the ground. Her body felt lighter right away which made her even more nervous when he drew closer. 

He freed her neck from the curtain of hair that covered it, slipping his face into the newly exposed proximity to her. 

“She walks in beauty, like the night...” he murmured in her ear, and she felt it resonate in her skin, a tremble in her skeleton.

Her hand slapped against his chest, pushing him away. 

“Save some for your date,” she let out a breathy laugh, trying to clear her head. 

Dazed, Cassian fell back to his spot against the wall. 

“You like that?”

“You know me. If there’s not a bookshelf around, what’s even the point?” she said dryly, picking up her bag. He nodded, and she moved as she always did; brusquely, and away from him. 

 

Before the date, she texted him: 

 **(i do not know what it is about you that closes** **  
****and opens; only something in me understands** **  
****the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)** **  
** **Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands**

 **e.e. cummings**  

**For your date.**

He scratched at his beard, staring at his phone. 

**_I don’t have small hands._ **

A pixelated ellipsis. 

**I know.**

Dot dot dot

**It’s what she wants to hear.**

He wanted to say something better, pull her closer. She was sharp, she could text the right words and it felt like she was over his shoulder, laughing at him, trying to help him pick the words to make them fit. 

**So you’ll be** **#cummingtonite** She added, and he laughed.

It was a fine date. Fine. The word echoes in his head, one he knows Jyn would dive-bomb on what a weak and insignificant word  _ fine _ was. 

All went according to plan, though he didn’t use Byron or cummings, because she didn’t seem the type to want to hear it. It’d be like feeding a steak dinner to a hamster. But she was pretty, and nice, and he got back to his room with her in tow without dragging Byron into this. 

What wasn’t part of the plan was his phone  _ spasming _ with messages from Jyn:

**Is it working yet, Don Juan?**

**See if she likes Resumé by Dorothy Parker.**

**Speaking of Dorothy, I should really leave you alone, seeing as I’m too fucking busy and you’re vice versa.**

Jyn was funny, she was quick, but now  _ really wasn’t _ the time, and there was nothing worse than checking your phone over the head of the girl currently  _ giving you head,  _ it was just tacky. But the buzzing continued, and instead of turning off his phone like a normal person -he was in somewhat of a compromised state- he answered. 

**Jyn, enough.**

The texts stopped.

 

The texts never _ restarted. _ He saw her in class and she was back to her cool, prim and superior self, shoving books in her bag before class ended so she could be up and out before he had the chance to corner her. He would get to class early, and she would  _ almost _ be late, a sin she never committed, and he’d steal her seat as a ploy for attention. 

She simply settled in his usual spot, lips drawn together in a displeased look. He’d at least expected a punch for that.

He attempted to slide her the book back, having marked up a John Donne poem;

**Mark but this flea, and mark in this,** **  
****How little that which thou deniest me is;** **  
****It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,** **  
** **And in this flea our two bloods mingled be**

In the margins: **Flea=The red-hot sexual tension between us???? Thoughts??? Suck Thee????**

But she just chewed her lip and flitted her eyes back to the front of the room.

It was getting irritating, how much she ignored him. Especially when he was intentionally making it obvious that it was  _ really bothering him.  _

If she so much as asked the time, he would have his phone out, blurting out the first series of numbers that light up the screen. He’d hand over his syllabus at the slightest indication she didn’t know what was due the next week. He offered her half of his sandwich when her stomach growled.  _ He chased her halfway across campus to give her back a pen she dropped.  _

She took all of these offers with the detached expression of someone who was clearly dealing with a crazy person. 

And he felt crazy. He was  _ never _ nice to her before. Now it seemed to occupy his entire being. 

The answer of what to do was so simple it took almost a week to figure out; asking her what was wrong.

“Are you mad at me?”

Her head lifted out of the book she was reading, narrowing her eyes behind her glasses as the literary fog puffed out of existence around her. 

“No…” she said slowly, like he was being strange. 

“You just, I don’t know...”

If she was lying, he had no way of getting her to tell the truth, and if she wasn’t he had no idea why he was there, standing in front of her in the library at 11 O’Clock at night. 

“I felt weird about when I was texting you, that’s all,” her eyes fell back to her book, “I overstepped a boundary. I get it. Why would you want to have sex with someone when it feels like someone else is in the room?”

He almost said he liked having her in the room, but bit his tongue, because she’d treated him like he was crazy enough lately. 

“It got a little out of hand, but you’re funny, so why would I stop you?”

She shrugged. “You know girls like me. I was in the library and I got bored. Lots of bookshelves, you know.”

“It’s okay. I sort of let you become my enabler.”

She nodded, raising her eyebrows. “Is that it?”

He honestly choked in front of her. He knew she was razor-sharp before all this started, but she was ruthless now, looking up at him with a bored, detached expression. 

“I guess it is.”

He left her with her words, because he was without them.

 

The next night he decided to push it when he saw her from across the quad, leaving the library;

**I have another date tonight, can you feed me some lines, Cyrano?**

The timing was fated, which is why his actions were so impulsive. She was standing by one of the streetlights on the path, the night barely beginning so the sky was pale blue. He watched Jyn pull her phone out of her pocket, fumble with it, and he knew she saw the message when she went perfectly still. 

Her thumb worked furiously against the screen;

**Sure, what else is a girl like me good for?**

It was like an abyss opened around her, some kind of void of hurt feelings, that he couldn’t bear watch for more than thirty seconds before jogging into sight to put her out of her misery.

“Jyn!” 

She spun around, her face bright with anxiety. 

“I was kidding,” he held up his hands, catching her by the elbows when her face crumpled. “Hey. I’m sorry. I was kidding.”

He braced himself for an evisceration. He knew she could lance him with her words, cold and calculated. 

“That didn’t feel good,” she blurted out. He could tell she was trying very hard not to cry. The guilt that opened up in his chest made his lose his breath for a moment.

“I know,” he smoothed her hair out of her face, “Shit, Jyn, I know. I'm so sorry.”

His lips connected to her brow, her temple, her cheek. The fragility of her skull under his lips astounded him. He wasn’t even sure if he ever thought to kiss another person’s face this thoroughly. His arms banded around her. God, he wanted her. This was new. 

She tilted her head up at him, her eyes runny, and accepted his kiss to her lips with a cautious gratitude. She swung an arm around his neck, rising on her toes and pulling him down to close the distance between them. 

He broke the kiss for a minute “Which line did it? Was it the Byron?”

She fisted her hands in his hair, darting her head to kiss him angling one way, then another. They were quick pecks, and her eyes were still closed, like waiting for a blessing. The gesture was so demure and fairy-like that there was a tremble in his spine. 

“Just take me home, idiot.”


	3. Chapter 3

It was a slow commute home, a train ride with Jyn. The car tossed lazily, his fingers fanned over her bare knee, they didn’t speak. He did, occasionally, lift his eyes to their reflection in the window across from their seats. He caught her looking too. 

“What are we doing?” He finally murmured, pressing a kiss where her hair tucked behind her ear.

She glanced at him incredulously. “It’s not like you’ve never done this before.”

He smiled, arm slipping around her shoulders. “I didn’t know you were that easy to seduce.”

She shook her head. “I just figured you should do the seducing at your place, because I didn’t want to get seduced, then board a train and break up the tension you were building.” 

“How thoughtful of you.”

“Charitable, really. Otherwise you’d never recover.”

He smirked, leaning over and biting a pinch of skin on her neck between his teeth. “We’ll see about that.”

 

She was nervous, entering his apartment. It was the kind of small student housing she’d expected, but with a pleasantly airy quality and was much neater than any guys’ apartments she’d had the pleasure of frequenting. 

It had a nicer couch than a usual dirty futon and what seemed to be a functional, oft-used kitchen, and it seemed less transient that typical student housing, which she found charming. He had that expectant silence when she walked into the room, waiting for her observation, hackles up. 

“I like it,” she said softly, there was a hum of traffic that was gentle enough to have personality without being annoying. Someone drove down the street below with music blasting out the windows of their car, for only a moment, a small thing Jyn always actually found kind of sexy, a drive-by, defiant glimpse for the public of their own life. 

Cassian shook his head. “It’s a shithole. I know you’ll have to lower some established standards.”

“Speaking of which, how are you planning to seduce me?”

He shook his head, chuckling as he pulled off his jacket, and drawing closer to her after he hung it up.

“I figured, you know, be in the moment. Did I really have to prepare a sonnet to deliver at your balcony?”

“You have to choose correctly  from three boxes with riddles on each side to win my hand.”

He pretended to think about it. “The gold one?”

“That’s a good way to get banished.”

“Romeo gets banished too.”

_ Shakespeare fuckboi.  _

Jyn put her foot down, otherwise they would be here all night. “I happen to like...the effort put in. That we talked about. I’m sure it was just a joke to you, but I… I guess I liked you trying to keep up with me.” 

He drew nearer, placing his hands on her waist. “That’s understandable. Why don’t you choose this evening’s selections?”

She looked unhappy with the suggestion. He dropped his lips to her collarbone, peeling her jacket aside just enough to get his mouth on her skin. “I just don’t feel like I can pick anything that’s good enough for you. Words-wise.”

She swung at his arm, and they were back where they started. 

“I can’t tell you how to seduce me. That throws out any chance at it feeling sexy. I might as well masturbate.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You can do that. I won’t bother you or make a sound, you won't even know I'm here-”

She hit him again, biting her lips to hide her laugh. 

He wanted her. He really wanted her. He just wished she would make this easier. 

“Remember what I said, about it not being the words themselves, but how you say them?”

She nodded, looking doubtful. 

“I’ll make a bet with you. You resist my seduction techniques, and I’ll…” he didn’t know what to promise her “Poem of your choice. Memorized and recited in front of bookshelf of your choosing. Super Byronic. All between your thighs, of course.”

“That’s then,” Jyn tilted her head, “what about now?”

She wasn't going to make a goddamn step of this easy, was she?

“Okay, I choose any innocuous text and make you absolutely writhing with desire for me, or I’ll eat your pussy up against a classics library or somewhere else that’ll get us arrested.”

“Why not both?”

“If you don’t resist, we can.”

“This sounds very transactional.”

Cassian held up one finger and went to his kitchen, digging through the cabinets. He held up a box of cereal. 

“You have nothing to lose, Erso.”

She raised her eyebrows. 

“Except respect for you.”

“You’re inevitably going to ask me to dirty talk in Spanish, and you'll have no way of knowing I’m not just reciting infomercials because it sounds so sexy. So trust me.”

She laughed, shaking her head. “You can try.”

He grinned, reaching across the counter to grab her wrist, drawing her to his side. 

He spun her to face away, belly pressed to the counter, hands on her hips. 

_ “Sugar,” _ he drawled, box in hand, his free hand covering one of hers on the counter. She rolled her eyes. So he had a sexy voice. That wasn’t going to make her panties drop over some nutritional facts. He lifted her hair ff her neck with the sweep of his hand  _ “Degerminated yellow corn flour.” _

She snorted, but his lips touched her ear, his voice low and steady. The hand on hers lifted to press to her stomach, pushing her to lean against his body. 

What struck Jyn about Cassian was he was always a good reader. Fitzgerald, she had noted months ago, sounded particularly good on his tongue -though she was more Team Zelda.

“Whole grain oat flour,” he purred the ‘r’ and it was a sound he didn't usually have in his normal speaking voice, so she did twitch her shoulder upwards when she heard it. 

“Fructose,” a rhythm to his speech started to chart its way in her brain. Goddamnit. He was actually pacing it out in iambic pentameter. She’d call him a Shakespeare fuckboi but the rhythm was familiar, it was good, and  _ it was working.  _

“Vegetable oil (soybean  _ and _ palm).”

At  _ palm _ , he did exactly that, at the underside of her breast under her jacket. It tickled against her ribs. She flinched slightly at the touch. 

She laughed, but it was more nervous than anything else when his lips ghosted her ear. He’d found her spot. Shit. There was no turning back now. He felt her twitch in his arms.

"How are we doing?" he asked, dropping away from where she wanted him to kiss to mouth at her shoulder, head bowed behind her. 

"Fine."

"Enjoying yourself?"

She bit back a laugh, shaking her head. 

"If anything this proves just how good I am at ignoring the things you say."

“Should I lift that little skirt before I get to modified corn starch?”

She laughed, tension releasing in a breathless kind of exhale, “That’s  _ cheating.” _

“I don’t think you’ll stop me, though.”

He did lift her skirt, cupping a shaking thigh. 

“It’s not fair when you use your own words…”

She slid a hand to the back of his neck for support as he teased her thigh, not touching her where she wanted him. 

“When you enlist me to seduce you, Jyn, you’re not going to get fair, you’re going to get seduced.”

“But-”

“Mmm,” he chuckled against her ear, which he’d noticed her earlier reactions to, but decided to save until now, “thiamine hydrochloride.”

He pulled her lobe between his teeth, letting his breath ghost the shell. He made a deep, resonant noise in his chest that had her nearly slip to the floor if it weren’t for his arms around her. 

“Put the box down.”

“Why?”

“I want both your hands.”

“So this is working on you. You’re turned on by this.”

“S-shut up.”

“This is a new level of filthy, you literary pervert. The purist reduced to a trembling mess at a nutritional facts panel.”

“Shut the fuck up, you got what you wanted, now just _do something.”_

He turned her to face him, hoisting her up on the counter. 

“You know this gives me bragging rights for about, forever, right?”

She shook her head. Her face looked unconvinced as always, even as she peeling her jacket off her shoulders. “You’re lucky you’re pretty.”

He kissed her, still triumphant. 

That was how it started. 

 

But just because it started… he had assumed there would be a change. A melding of routine. But instead, they lived just as parallel, only intersecting in time they made specifically for Jyn’s healthy sexual appetite. They would go to class and act like nothing happened and then go home together and hook up. She shrugged him off in the library, rebuffed kisses when he passed her on campus, looked at him for the millionth time with a heavy suspicion of his insanity when draped his arm over the back of her chair. 

“You’re ignoring me,” Jyn nosed at his ankle. He propped his book open on his chest, sighing.

“Jyn, I’m reading.”

“So?”

“If I did this while you were reading, I’d lose a hand.”

She smiled, shook her head. She pushed herself up on her elbows. His head rested on her pillows, hers was dangling off the edge, until she decided she wanted his attention.

“Find a way to amuse yourself, I have to study.”

She let one leg hang over the edge of the bed. From his vantage point, well, it was no secret what color underwear she was wearing.“Do you really?”

He groaned. “Yes, Jyn, I’d be inside you already if this wasn’t really important.”

“Really?” She sat up, and her voice was low and dangerous. “And how would you be inside me?”

He turned his eyes back to his book. Which was a blur now, thank to her, but he was giving a noble effort to resist.

“Cassian?”

“Hmm?”

She straddled him, and he released the breath he was holding.

“How, Cassian?”

“Well. To mutual completion. I would ravish you mightily with my manhood until you bore my seed, but only until it reached your IUD.”

“Mmm, IUDs,” she murmured, leaning down to grasp one of his wrists. She pulled it to her lips, kissed the soft skin, licked along the veins. “You could make the phonebook sound sexy.”

“You’re a seductive menace.”

She lifted her skirt, drawing her dress over her head. “What’re you reading?”

“A book.”

“What book?”

“A book for class.”

“Cassian,” she sighed, and he glanced up to see her hands moving under her bra, teasing her breasts. 

“What are you doing?”

“I’m amusing myself,” she said with a predatory smile. He forced himself to tear his eyes away. 

“What’s the book about?”

“Politics. Greed. Lust. Sex with difficult women.”

“You don’t know, do you?”

“It’s been a complete blur the last fifty pages, thanks for asking.”

“You’ll read it better if we just have sex first,” she whined, grinding down on his ever-growing erection. 

“Is this punishment for my hubris, thinking I could lie next to you on your bed and _just study?”_ he groaned, tossing the book aside. His arm banded around her back, rising up to thrust against her open legs. 

She picked it back up, handing it to him opened to a random page. 

“No, keep reading.”

“Jyn.”

“To me,” she hedged,  _“out loud.”_

_He kept it up as long as he could, but there was a point where words weren’t necessary, and Jyn needs his lips against her own. The book was forgotten._

The sex was good. The sex was great. If he’d proven the words didn’t matter, she’d proven on equal footing that they did. The way she said “Cock” or “Fuck” was irreplaceable by any other word, and would never sound as sweet by any other name. 

Shit. If she could read his mind, she’d call him Shakespeare Fuckboi for the millionth time.

“Queen of England,” he murmured in her ear one night, post-coitous, combing her hair out of her sweaty face. He was like that with her messy hair, always brushing it aside, playing with individual strands, lifting it off her neck to press kisses onto oft-hidden skin.

She grimaced. There were few worse things to bring up after a screaming orgasm involving some well-placed Keats. “What?”

“Byron. Connections. Do your thing.”

Jyn smirked, hitting the ground running with impressive tenacity. “He fucked the wife of Queen Victoria’s future Prime Minister. Fucked her so good she went crazy and wrote a book about him as a vampire.”

“Not true.”

_ “Everyone _ wrote a book about how Lord Byron was a vampire. It was in the fashion of the day.”

That’s a hell of a break up.” His thumb circled a freckle on her shoulder blade. 

She placed her chin on his chest, sighing. “I think that’s what we all have to go through at one point though. Get dicked so good you go a little crazy when it’s gone.”

“You’re writing your elegy for my cock already, aren’t you Erso?”

“Only for when I cut it off someday.”

She kissed the center of his chest, but he noticed she used her lips to punctuate depending on how deep her threat lay. He pressed his thumb to her plush lips, and she kissed the soft pad. 

“Who was your dick-centered mental breakdown?”

She rolled onto her back, regarding him skeptically. “Hasn’t happened yet.”

He rolled on his stomach, still beside her but higher, so her could look at her. 

“Neither has mine.”

She smirked at him. “I know. She’s coming. You’re in for it.”

He raised his eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

“That you’re kind of a player and that you’re going to get it  _ bad,” _ she smiled, tapping his nose condescendingly. 

Like clockwork, when he asked her  _ again _ to spend the night, she refused. 

 

He wanted more of her. He wanted more than just having her swing by his apartment for some wordplay, then some foreplay, then actual play; and like all beginnings, middles, and ends, not necessarily in that order. 

He texted her one impulsive night, after she had stumbled out of his apartment on colt-limbs, fucked silly but not enough to be unable to get home, somehow, (he offered to let her crash there, but she refused). She must have still been on her train home. 

**Theater department is doing a modernized version of Romeo and Juliet.**

The silence after that text was unbearable. He got up and paced the apartment, even though he had been pretty ready to just fall asleep, and was still naked.

A blessed chime.

**How bad are we talking?**

He dove at his phone. 

**They’re texting each other heart and knife emojis in the poster art. Wanna go?**

The excitement faded to caution, his phone was silent for a few minutes. He lay back, ready to call this one quits. A bad idea. The wrong person. 

Him, he was the wrong person in this scenario.

**Sounds awful. Absolutely.**

 

Jyn met him outside the theater building without her usual jacket, in a pretty blue sundress that floated around her knees with a vintage cut-out neckline that was both prim and sexy. Her thick watch was still on her wrist, and her feet were clad in heavy black sandals. She tied her usually crazy hair in a bun at the top of her head. She looked really pretty without a messenger bag full of eighty books weighing her down. 

She smiled and hugged him when she saw him, the mid-may sunset doing crazy things for the image each person was viewing. Brown hair looked magical in honeyed sunshine. 

“We’re early, so do you want to just...walk around?”

She bit back a smile. “I wouldn’t mind. It’s a nice night.”

It was a syrupy, lazy evening, and everyone on campus seemed calmer. Cheerier. She even let him hold her hand, even though she teased him mercilessly about it. 

“When you say ‘modernized’...” she began warily, glancing up at him with a dubious expression.

“I don’t know anything more than you do.”

“So like, iambic pentameter set in modern day LA? Or like, Modern-modern language? Or modern language in iambic pentameter…”

She looked slightly sick. 

He smiled, reaching a finger to swipe at the skin behind her ear that had never been this exposed to him. She stepped away, laughing. 

“I’m sure you will find many things to hate about it.” She raised her eyebrows, nodding. He wasn’t wrong. “I fully intend to hate them right alongside you.”

She smirked, kissing the hand locked in hers. “If you try to hold my hand during this play, I will break your fingers.”

He squeezed her hand in response. “Noted.”

 

“That was-”

“I just-”

They stared at each other hopelessly. 

“The worst.”

“The  _ worst.”  _ Jyn threw up her hands. They’d made it to the parking lot before expelling their opinions, messy ones like vomit. 

“I don’t think I can sleep tonight.”

“This is your own fault,” she pointed at him, laughing. “I will be kept awake with this. How did everything go wrong?”

“Were the Capulets and Montagues supposed to be gangs? Of like...white people? The whole cast was white.”

Jyn shrugged. “I honestly can’t tell you. I need a drink.”

“I need as many as it takes to forget what we witnessed. We have  _ been through war _ together, Jyn.”

She smiled softly. “Do you want to get a drink?”

He nodded, trying not to seem overeager. 

“I know a place,” she nodded to herself. She seemed to have to decide to actively bring him along. “Come on.”

A drink somehow meant  _ pizza.  _ Pizza and beer. Neon and grease and not enough napkins, never enough, even if there were piles of them covering every flat surface of the place. Jyn blew kisses at the guy working in the small white-light square of a kitchen window, calling over her shoulder, “The usual, Baze.”

It was clear she was a beloved regular, because the front of the house also chatted her up, personally waiting on their table (there were only three other customers) and doting on her. 

“Chirrut,” he said abruptly, extending a hand to Cassian, “So nice to meet Jyn’s  _ friend.” _

"Watch your step," the chef yelled from the kitchen. 

"That floorboard has been that was for twenty years, _I know."_ Chirrut shot back. 

_ My gay uncles _ she mouthed to Cassian. He smiled. Coronas at a the local gay pizzeria wasn’t what he expected, but who was he to complain?

They talked about the play, but they didn’t feel like dissecting it. Jyn’s cruel but succinct critique was there was no statement made to warrant it worthy of existing.

"I happen to like Romeo and Juliet," she admitted, halfway through her second beer.

_ "No,"  _ he bit into a grease-saturated slice, "the great Jyn Erso?"

She rolled her eyes. "It's about a world that can't sustain two lovers. Not their love itself. But the language is pretty great."

"Killing yourself for your boyfriend? That's not behavior you would ever condone."

She nodded at that, "I don't. But they were young and it was this big thing in their lives that became forbidden and shameful. Of course they're going to rebel. If they'd been allowed to see each other, they wouldn't have gotten married so fast, no one would have died. They probably would have just ridden out their infatuation and gotten sick of each other."

He laughed, shaking his head. "That sounds _more_ tragic."

Jyn folded her third slice in her hand, primly biting into it to prevent stray oil from leaking down her chin. Gotta love east coast pizza. 

“So you’re never had The Big Break-Up before,” Cassian asked abruptly. The question had been on his mind for a while. She was so guarded, there had to be a story there. And a story being there was usually a sign to run, but with Jyn… he just wanted to know more. And to stay. 

She lowered her slice. 

“Neither have you,” she said flatly. 

He sipped his beer, trying to act casual. “Yeah, but you’ve offered your critique of my dating habits. What about you?”

She shrugged, pointedly flippant. “I don’t know. I’m a bailer. I never got that close.”

“You said we all have to go through it.”

She rolled her eyes, taking a sip of her beer. “Yeah, maybe.” 

She picked at a stray cheese-stretch that had gotten away from her and crusted on the serving tray. “My parents… my mom died when I was little.”

“I’m sorry,” he blurted out. She shrugged, defensive, and kept going.

“And my dad, he lost his best friend. So when people try to drag me into this relationship drama, of deciphering emojis or ghosting or snapchatting their dicks, I just… entire conflicts are being held over subtweets and instagram. If your phone fell into the sea, would there be any proof you had a relationship with this person? It's meaningless. My dad didn’t want this elaborate, social-media scene of validation. He wanted his best friend back.”

She stared out the giant front window of the pizzeria. Cassian couldn’t hold his tongue.

“But doesn’t that just completely belittle every possible relationship? By saying that your parents aren’t happy and together, so why is it even worth pursuing? Death and a catty argument on social media aren’t the same kind of problem. I’m sure when they got together there was an elaborate phone etiquette that led to confli-”

Jyn was glaring at him. Seething. But her gaze ran cold.

"I just don't want to waste my time."

Cassian tapped his thumb on the table, annoyed at her for reasons he couldn't name. 

"So you don't even want to try? Because you could end up alone and it's all technology's fault? It's always technology's fault, never yours, is it?"

Jyn dropped her napkin onto the half-empty pizza tray. She refused to look at him. 

"I don't owe you a chance to prove me wrong all the time, Cassian. I'm pretty set in my ways."

"It's just that it's a false equivalence."

Her eyes were sharp as ever, and instead of teasing the edge of the blade against him, it was pressed to his throat. 

And then the look was gone.

"I'm sure you're not actually giving me dating advice, _Casanova._ Come on." She stood, tossing some bills onto the table. Cassian scrambled for his wallet. 

"I should-" 

"You got the tickets, I can get dinner," she smiled slipping out of the restaurant into the humid night.

"I wanted to-"

"I know, but I wanted to too, okay? It's not a big deal." 

She smiled over her shoulder at him, pretty obviously walking towards the train station. 

He asked her questions about herself. He tried discussing with her. Had he done something wrong? He was just trying to understand, and maybe... be understood. 

"Are we good?"

She spun to face him, her face easy and calm. "Yeah, I had a good time. We're good."

He gave her a longer hug than necessary. She took a deep breath of _him_ before she pulled away. 

"Besides, it's _you._ It's not like this was a date."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You all are so going to kill me. I can feel it in my bones.


	4. Chapter 4

_“I hate that guy,”_ Jyn muttered as class let out. Cassian glanced up from his backpack, where he was digging for a book that made him think of her when he came across it.

“What? Who? George Elliot?”

“George Elliot was a woman,” she tapped her pen against her lips pissily, glaring at him. “And no, _Mr. “Hemingway is the Only Author Worth Respecting”_ over there.”

She pointed to the crossfire of the scene of the crime. Cassian’s eyes slid to Han’s empty seat. He and Jyn had been pretty much at each other’s throats since this course started.

“I mean, let’s not knock Hemingway.”

Jyn’s face wrinkled in a disgusted look. “Ew. I can’t believe I’ve had sex with you.”

“Well I can’t do anything about that,” he slid her the copy of Samantha Ellis’s _How to Be a Heroine._ She lifted it off the table and assessed it with a small smile. Her eyes flipped back up to the empty chair, glaring at it.

“He interrupts me every time I try to talk.”

Cassian shrugged. “He’s just like that.”

“He doesn’t do that to you. Or Krennic. Just me and the three other girls in this class.”

“He’s an asshole,” Cassian’s knee bounced anxiously, waiting for her to say something about the book. “You’re smarter than him.”

“I know that,” she grumbled, “It doesn’t mean I don’t deserve to ask for respect.”

“So that book made me think of you,” he blurted out. She raised her eyebrows.

“Okay…”

She glanced back down at it, but her eyes flickered up to Han’s empty seat one last time. He leaned closer, the room was empty, so he figured she wouldn’t mind. “It’s a memoir about growing up with these characters and different interpretations. A character will get an essay, and some comparisons to other literary heroines. I just figured, since you’re like an encyclopedia, you’d like it.”

She smiled faintly, reading the back cover.

“Thanks. I’ll get it back to you soon.”

He cleared his throat. “No. I mean, keep it.”

There was an angular slide downwards in her expression. She nodded curtly. “Oh. Okay. I have a meeting with my advisor.”

“Oh.”

And for someone who had the reservoir of stolen words, he had nothing more to say she she scooped up her bag and walked out.

He had a feeling he did something wrong again, but he wasn’t sure what it was.

 

Texting was never fun. It was transcribed intimacy, and he didn’t like when his seduction techniques were shared around campus through screenshots by jilted Communications majors.

He liked calling a girl with some Neruda and wine on his lips, dripping and happy, because no one could pull that up after he ghosted, screenshots blazing, calling him a liar.

He never lied about his feelings, they just changed too quickly for him to back up what he said for more than a few days.

But looking at his phone, the transcripts said that he liked Jyn for a long time.

She only answered every third time;

**Hey. Sorry. No, I can’t go, it’s a library night.**

**Pizza sounds *heavenly*. However, this essay is my third level of Hell, and I’m trying to make my way to the seventh. Rain check?**

**Yeah, I heard that was happening. I'm actually going home this weekend? Sorry.**

And his responses:

**Okay.**

**Okay.**

**Okay.**

His _actual_ transcripts seemed to agree; he was really hung up on Jyn.

His GPA dropped a full .7 points since they’d started fooling around. And he used that GPA to assure himself he was doing alright in life. Not the girls he brought home. Not the sex. Not the concept of being wanted. But that precise number, edging up and up and up with all the balancing he did.

And he didn’t care, because all the time not studying and wanting to be near Jyn, or worrying about Jyn not answering, or having sex with Jyn, that was the sacrifice. Point-Seven Points. Who cared?

He was still a little anxious the next time she was stretched across his bed, skirt tangled around her hips, insisting they read for a while.

He tested her, out loud, with a particularly lush passage of The Goblin Market:

 

_She cried, “Laura,” up the garden,_

_“Did you miss me?_

_Come and kiss me._

_Never mind my bruises,_

_Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices_

_Squeez’d from goblin fruits for you,_

_Goblin pulp and goblin dew._

_Eat me, drink me, love me;_

_Laura, make much of me;_

_For your sake I have braved the glen_

_And had to do with goblin merchant men.”_

 

His thumb was making absent circles on her ankle bone, but she laughed abruptly.

“You’re not going to seduce me with a critique of capitalism.”

He glanced up at her. “I thought it was sexual awakening. And lesbianism.”

She rolled onto her stomach, laughing. “ _Oh no._ Did you think I was a lesbian this whole time? I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to lead you on.”

He dragged her, just a few sparse inched, towards her with a firm hand around her ankle. The rough jerk of her had her sprawling across the mattress. She yelped, and laughed. Her skirt was around her waist, but she arched her back instead of dragging it down to a more conservative place. The view was _killing_ him.

“You like when I talk Capitalism.”

She rolled her eyes, unbuttoning her blouse anyway. “I preferred cereal.”

Her thin fingers went to the buttons at this throat. “We’re talking too much about me. You, Cassian, are incredibly turned on by capitalism _and_ lesbianism.”

“I try to cover all of my bases.”

Her shoulders wriggled their way out of her shirt, and she climbed in his lap.

“Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices,” she hissed in his ear, and he trembled under her. She laughed, a sharp cry.

“Context is important,” she let him kiss her neck.

“I taught you that.”

“You haven’t taught me a damn thing. I’m a prodigy.”

Finally, it flew out of his mouth. Not the right words, but the ones he meant;

“How about a real date? You and me. Leave Byron at home. I don’t want to share you.”

She froze, her eyes wide on his face. “What?”

“Well, fucking each other for the irony of it loses its appeal after a while.”

She broke eye contact with him. “I don’t like straying far from fuckbuddies. Sorry. I’m so busy with studying, and this whole things works the way it is for me right now.”

“Studying? My grades are shot because of you.”

She flinched back, lifting herself away. “That’s not my fault.”

He shook his head. “I’m not saying it was. I’m saying that this is worth sacrificing for to me. We can go slow.”

She lifted her shirt off the bed, shrugging it back on. She was so pretty and warm and open a moment ago, but the minute he tried to pin her down, she snapped shut. He was reeling, wondering what it was he did wrong.

“It’s not for me. I just… I thought this was, I don’t know, different from the girls you were dating.”

He stepped towards her. “It can be the same, if you want it to be.”

She shook her head. That seemed to have offended her _more._

“The thing about revealing your seduction techniques to someone, Cassian, is that they won’t work on them anymore.”

Like a magician revealing his tricks, the magic was gone. Jyn may have appreciated the art to it, but most of her enjoyment was clearly in ironic fun. Sure, to him, it started that way, and he wasn’t sure when his attempts to get her into bed became genuine, his stake on her time sincere. Just that this felt like a fatal blow, and he was seven points behind her, and she hadn’t wavered a bit.

She was gone before he was even sure what was happening.

 

Jyn gave him custody of the book of poetry. Or at least, tried to give it back. But even though she left it at his seat, he left class without it, and she felt pathetic to look at it sitting there.

The post-its were curled from being shoved back and forth between bags. She lifted the cover to a random page.

_The art of losing isn’t hard to master..._

She snapped the book shut and left it on the table.

She was most offended because they were friends. It felt like she was closer to him than the girls who fell for his usual tricks for. He had pulled back the veil and let her see the man behind the curtain. They had laughed for the kind of thing the girls he hooked up with fell for. There was a sacred level to that kind of trust.

So him hitting on her…

Was there any evidence it ever happened?

There was a ticket stub, a pizza parlor receipt, his handwriting in a book. Were these the things she was trying amass?

They didn’t feel worth more than a string of texts promising to be better.

Cassian maybe stole words because he wasn’t good with them.

Maybe she wasn’t any better than them. Him included.

 

A draft of her paper sat on his kitchen counter. She must have left it over the weekend.

He had never actually read any of her work. Just knew that she wiped the floor with him academics-wise.

He resisted temptation, but not enough to throw it away. He ran into her outside Krennic’s office, looking sour from whatever happened inside.

He almost dared to ask, but she brushed him aside. That hurt.

He’d probably seen a side she’d banned from close scrutiny. She was going to pretend it didn’t exist.

So he did the reasonable thing: got drunk. Try to find a poem that encapsulated how he felt (there was none, but the detached tone of Hemingway did encapsulate how he wanted to feel).

Drunk, stumbling across his kitchen, he swiped up her paper. Spitefully, he had thrown the box of cereal he recited in Spanish to her at the wall -creating a mess outside of himself to match the on inside. His eyes fell on a random page -her citations were usually a mess, and he was checking to see if she at least did the honor of fixing them before getting a higher grade than him:

 

_...Rochester can’t respect Jane until his hubris finally has consequences. Real ones, not just a possible bastard, Adele, added to his caravan of women he can be emotionally unavailable to. Jane can’t respect herself until she denies herself the easy thing she always wanted without earning it. The obstacles in Jane Eyre don’t get in the way of a perfect love; they forge the perfect partnership._

 

He sat cross legged on the floor of his kitchen and read the whole paper three times.

 

“I think Austen uses romance as a disguise for a greater argument. Romance is an inherently feminine genre, and because of that use of feminine space, I think it’s an interesting anthropological relic of female perspective-”

Han cut Jyn off dismissively with a wave of his hand. Krennic allowed it.

“See, while women were reading romance novels, men were fighting wars. That’s why the objectively best works of fiction are written by men, and women have Jane Austen.”

Jyn slumped against her seat, defeated. Cassian lifted his head. Usually she kept going, or rebutted violently, but he saw it in her clenched jaw. Her hand covered her mouth, and she was staring, hatefully, at the mud-colored carpeting that was ever present in the English Building.

She just lost her fight. And it pissed him off.

It wasn’t about snarking about it, saying the right thing after it happened.

This was about learning from his mistake and forming a partnership.

“You interrupt a lot,” Cassian blurted out.

Han faltered. “Oh. Okay. So I was saying-”

“A lot,” Cassian’s hands formed into fists on his lap. “She was talking, and I don’t think she was finished yet.”

Jyn took a deep breath, he could hear it from a few seats over. Her hand left her mouth, she was staring at the table.

Krennic finally glanced down from the ceiling, raising his eyebrows. “Jyn, did you have something to say?”

He saw her grimace, and felt terrible for making her the focus of this. That hadn’t been his intention.

“No.” she said quietly. “No.” Again, louder.

Quick on his feet, Cassian had to save this. “Then I had a question, Jyn.”

Her mouth twisted in discomfort. “Yeah?”

“Jane Austen not being a romantic genre, only appropriating one. Why do you think it’s restricted by that classification? Why can’t it be a celebration of both?”

Jyn chuckled, at him, not with him. “Because it’s about class. It’s about women being rewarded for their actions at a time where the only reward for them was advantageous marriage.”

Han leapt in: “I was trying to say-”

“We’re still talking,” Cassian said. People were starting to look afraid of him. “But it could also be about relationships, because the men are just as active in sorting out misunderstandings. If it’s about a partnership, can’t we just say it’s _good_ romance?”

“Because then it gets written off. Then it doesn’t matter. Then we don’t take it seriously. Every scene in an adaptation of _Pride and Prejudice_ that people _remember_ usually doesn’t even in the books. It’s just a lot of staid negotiations and dry, understated humor and people getting over their assumptions about each other and reconciling as a better, smarter person than they were before. That work isn’t received if Lizzie wants to fuck Darcy the minute she lays eyes on him.”

“Then it’s just a bad adaptation. Just because the reader fills it in, that they don’t have to be told that these two people would be good together constantly, doesn’t mean we don’t have an elevated form of that genre. I just feel like there’s this belief that romance is for idiots, when Jane Austen can instead prove it’s not, she doesn’t transcend the genre, she elevates it with her own work.”

“If you wanted to pick a fight about Jane Austen-”

“I’m not _fighting_ with you. I’m trying to compromise with you. Can’t it be both? Commentary and pleasure at one time?”

Han leaned back in his chair, “I think that romance, as a woman’s genre-”

Cassian and Jyn both turned on him; _“Shut up, Han.”_

Jyn faced Cassian again, her face vulnerable in a way he hadn’t seen since her cheek was pressed to his pillow the last time.

“There’s no winning in a romantic genre. It’s emotional pornography. If you hate it, you’re a cold bitch. If you love it, you’re another delusional woman. _Wuthering Heights_ has to be about toxic, horrible people and abuse with no positive to these two broken characters coping _within each other_ or else Emily Bronte is just another dumb _lady writer._ I’m tired of losing this fight, so I’m not doing it anymore.”

“But her use of Byron-”

Jyn’s eyes snapped up, wide and vulnerable.

“Byron was all about romance. Sex, yes, but in _chasing that_ there was a lascivious celebration of love and passion. A similar Byronic Hero set-up in _Jane Eyre_ , Rochester, is all about the blend of her practicality and his passion, not just one, but a mix.”

Shit. He’d read her paper. And all of _Jane Eyre._ He really did not want her to know he read her paper. And _Jane Eyre._

She chewed her lower lip, let him speak.

“But there’s this lack of control in romance. You don’t sit back and appreciate anything outside the infatuation of it, but when you have the woman in control...in the Bronte sisters’ novels, women having control is seen as the best possible scenario and are damned by their blind faith in romance. Lydia Bennet is not the romantic heroine, Elizabeth is. It has to be a mix.”

Jyn set her jaw and nodded in a detached way. There was an icy vibe that she just wanted this to be over.

Cassian was horrified. He just mansplained 19th Century Feminist Literature to _Jyn Erso,_ of all people.

“I think Jyn and Cassian just hijacked the class,” Han addressed to Krennic.

As professor and, ironically, the director of the English Department, he was on his phone. “I’ll allow it.”

 

She said nothing for about a week. Then, a text like an illuminated promise; **Jedha Books. Ten O’Clock. Yes, we’re allowed to be there.**

His hands were shaking on the train ride.

He found the place only half- lit up, well after closing, the bell above the door gently chiming.

It was like looking up her skirt, seeing a bookstore all cozily dressed down for the evening. He paced the creaking aisles, the worn carpeting, the books shadowy and mysterious. Maybe she lured him here to murder him.

Jyn was reading at the front counter, her leg dangling down, the other foot wedged under her bent knee.

Her feet are bare, like she was right at home.

“Bookstore date?” he murmured.

She shrugged.

“How’d you get this place for just us.”

“I called in a favor.”

She didn’t look up yet, turning a page.

“Why did you ask me here?”

Finally, she lifted her nose from her book. “No one’s has ever, ever, called Han for interrupting me _except for me.”_

He fidgeted, looking away. “It started to really bother me after you pointed it out.”

She nodded, a sad smile curving her cheek.

“Sometimes I say things in class that are harsher than what I feel.”

“You ever do that outside of class?”

Jyn’s eyes flickered to the ceiling.

_“Yes.”_

Cassian chewed his lower lip. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too.”

Those words weren’t borrowed, and it seemed to mean a lot more that way. Not that a good quote was wrong, but it was an indulgence, and they weren’t applicable to every person. One didn’t drink champagne for breakfast. That was the value in finding the right one, the right time. Not that anything could beat Jyn rising from the counter, dropping to her bare feet and walking towards him in the semi-darkness.

“I know your type, Cassian,” she grinned that terrifying grin that had intimidated him from day one. “Guys like you have a fantasy. The romantic hero who’ll say all the right words and then go down on you against a bookshelf.”

Her splayed hand landed on his stomach, pushing him back against the shelf he was in front of. She completely knocked him off balance, had a hand pulling his belt open, and was kissing him with her beautiful smart mouth before he regained full awareness that _this really was happening._

“I want to date,” she looked up at him, eyebrows raised. “No more ironic shit, okay? Just like me.”

“I do like you.”

He was breathless like a romantic heroine as she ravished him against a bookshelf. The right thing to say didn’t _always_ have to be pretentious.

It wasn’t Shakespeare, but it certainly was more eloquent than what he blurted out, cheeks flushed, in the moments after she dropped to her knees and fulfilled what a guy like him _really_ wanted.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I loved writing this story! I may stick to this au and pop in every once in a while, Cassian could stand to return the favor bookshelf-wise.

**Author's Note:**

> THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GIVE ME LEAVE TO BE PRETENTIOUS OH MY GOD THIS WAS THE MOST FUN THING EVER TO WRITE. 
> 
> Six Degrees of Byron's Dick is also a very fun game that I would recommend to those who, unlike me, have a life.


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